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“... London laid out before me, 14 miles to the north. I owe my Surrey lane to the generosity of the Green Belt, that girdle of inviolate land drawn around London with seeming foresight in the 1930s. Because of such planners as Patrick Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin, who believed the countryside was virtuous and cities should be contained, Londoners like me can ...”

“... translation.’ In a recent interview Sato directs the reader to Nabokov’s savage demolition of Robert Lowell’s ‘adaptation’ of a Mandelstam poem: ‘“Adapted” to what? To the needs of an idiot audience? To the demands of good taste? To the level of one’s own genius?’ Although Sato’s translations have occasionally been criticised as ...”

“... some day,’ Henry Kissinger believes, ‘what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found frustration, who believed that in its rice fields and jungles some principle was to be established and entered them only ...”

“... a liberal.’ She talks in all the ways women have ever been supposed to talk. The pompous Miles Green, on the other hand, talks like a book; what’s worse, like this book – which advances its narrative by such means as: ‘This somewhat abrupt ending (or aposiopesis) is caused by a previous movement from the figure on the bed.’ Couched in every cant ...”

“... know Tilly could dance and had her rushing about the stage in a dress made from 12 metres of green satin. The choreography – presumably by Balanchine – ensured that she could turn at different points without tripping up. Towards the end of the season Edward put on a concert. Stravinsky had written a cello concerto and it was going to be played by ...”

“... In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St ...”

“... third person was responsible for their deaths.’ The manner of Petra Kelly’s death has haunted Green politics ever since. For if this really had been a suicide pact, as the evidence suggested, it abolished at a stroke the meaning of her short life. So the woman who professed an American high-school optimism and called her 1983 book of essays Um Hoffnung ...”

“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... changes in colour and intensity. The consequences are astonishing. Strong colours – red, green, blue I think, but it is hard to remember – come and go. You find you are seeing patterns – fields of cells, bubble shapes, lines. They arise, we are told, from the Purkinje effect. (Purkinje was the first to examine the way things seen in dim light ...”

“... still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie ...”

“... is no within within. This book, left incomplete at the time of Farson’s death and tidied up by Robert Violette, is touching and illuminating in part because there is such a mismatch between the author and his subjects. Gilbert and George can only be defined in a series of paradoxes. They have photographed and exhibited their shit and their arses, not to ...”

“... for Robert Foster and Nancy Fried I am come to this town, over which the sun is shining, the insects briefly silenced in the renewed air of the morning, and the turnpike from the capital momentarily empty, for my wedding. I lie alone in a motel room a mile out of town and two from the campus, the wrong end of the wrong street ...”

“... frogs in the entertainment industry. But there’s no way of checking on that.) They may both be green and imaginary, but apart from that the two frogs are very different. The frog-as-prince is the embodiment of a profoundly anti-frog message: to be a frog is to be punished, to be sentenced to a season in purgatory. As with most fairy tales, political ...”

“... to report on the world is still very fashionable, and in that sense Norman Gash’s book on Robert Surtees goes against the grain of present-day literary analysis. It does not go against the traditional grain of writing about Surtees, a novelist who has almost always been praised simply as a reporter of the English scene in the mid-19th century, even on ...”

“... envelopes from a variety of increasingly improbable authors and sources, all in the same green ink: W.H. Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord Godmanchester (Gumster), The John Peelcroft Hadmanchester Podgoets, Night Slide Clubb, P.O. Box 1AA, BBC-wise, W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these ...”